Social and welfare issues

OECD launches its Better Life Index in Brazil with Pelé on the eve of the World Cup

9/06/2014 - Today, the OECD launched the Portuguese version of its Better Life Index in Brazil with football legend Pelé. The Portuguese version is the site’s 6th language edition, enabling the OECD to reach over 240 million Portuguese speakers across the globe. So far the Index has reached over four million people in 184 countries, inviting them to voice what is most important to their well-being.

Speaking at the launch in São Paulo, organised by the OECD and Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), Pelé said: “The OECD’s Better Life Index shows people all over the world there is more to life than football.”

The Better Life Index invites citizens to create their own well-being index by ranking 11 well-being topics – housing, income, jobs, community, education, environment, civic engagement, health, life satisfaction, safety, work-life balance, and to compare how countries perform according to these personal criteria.

For the first time visitors to the site are now able to discover what more than 65 000 people around the world believe to be most important for their quality of life. Using an interactive map updated in real time, visitors are able to see a country’s well-being priorities and a breakdown of users in that country by gender and age. It is also possible to compare the responses between countries. Brazilian users of the Better Life Index, pictured below, rate education as their top priority, while those in Portugal see life satisfaction as more important.

In 2013, the launch of the Better Life Index into Spanish (www.ocdeindicevidamejor.org) increased participation across Spanish-speaking countries with notable increases in Argentina (by over 300% increase), Colombia (by over 500% increase), Costa Rica (by over 500% increase), Mexico (by over 300% increase) and Spain (by over 150% increase). The launch of the German site earlier this year also boosted engagement with users in Germany, yielding 2,000 new shared indexes within the first week (compared with nearly 3,000 indexes received in previous 2.5 years).

The Better Life Index is part of the OECD’s Better Life Initiative which measures and analyses people’s quality of life through a set of regularly updated well-being indicators. The Better Life Index is currently available in five languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Russian, and can be embedded onto websites and blogs.

Background

Based on the OECD's well-being research, the Better Life Index invites you to visualise well-being in OECD countries and beyond; it is an interactive tool through which you can look at how countries perform according to the importance you give to the various components of well-being. You are also able to compare well-being inequalities between men and women.

The Better Life Index was launched in 2011 and included the OECD’s 34 member countries. In 2012, Brazil and the Russian Federation were integrated.

More detailed country by country information on the results of well-being surveys compiled under the Better Life Initiative can be found here.

Fundação Getulio Vargas

The launch of the Better Life Index in Portuguese was made possible by the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV). For further information on the launch in Brazil and FGV, please contact FGV Projetos at melina.bandeira@fgv.br